


Fix you to fix me

by fluffywonder



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Domestic Avengers, F/M, M/M, Marvel Universe, Post-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:28:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25102438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffywonder/pseuds/fluffywonder
Summary: “Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” – Marilyn MonroePepper watches Tony fall in love – just not with her. Surprisingly, this ends up healing three people, all broken in very different ways.(Or: How Pepper and Natasha are goddesses, and how would anyone ever function without them?)Past Pepper/Tony; Clint/TonyThis fic is not strictly linear.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Kudos: 73
Collections: Assassin Twins + Tony





	Fix you to fix me

I.  
Pepper smiles fondly as she listens to Tony chattering on and on about this and that (she’d lost the actual thread of the conversation about four sentences back). They’re both trying so, so hard to pretend like everything is as it was, to act as thought nothing’s changed and everything is _normal_. In some ways, it even is – the sun is shining, birds are chirping, and they are sitting down to an outdoor business lunch at the trendy new café that just opened its doors a few days ago.   
  
Everything _is_ normal – as long as they don’t look too closely at the debris that still litters the Manhattan streets as New York slowly rebuilds itself from the wreckage that was Loki and the Chitauri.

Turning her attention back to Tony, she sees him waving his hands to illustrate whatever point has caught his fancy now. She’s already made him skim over and sign the budget proposals for various divisions within the Maria Stark Relief & Recovery Foundation, not to mention had him go over the paperwork the board had been loudly demanding for days now. She’d taken pity on him when she saw his eyes begin to glaze over – anything to do with the board always did – so she’d summarized them verbally instead of making him read reams and reams worth of duplicitous fine print (because _the board_ ). As the resident expert Tony-wrangler, she’s generally not a fan of letting him off the hook regarding paperwork, so she has to wonder whether it’s because she loves this man, or whether it’s actually due to the guilt burning a path through her gut. She certainly would never have let him get away with half-assing board paperwork before, but before hadn’t included a portal opening up in the sky, hadn’t included gods and aliens and monsters and mind control, hadn’t included a goddamn nuke and a self-sacrificing jerk of a boyfriend, and before hadn’t included one missed call. So she lets him get away with damn near anything and everything these days, because by the gods, he is _here_ , sitting across the table from her, even though she hadn’t been there for him when he’d needed it, when he’d thought those would be his last moments. She knows how incredibly _lucky_ she is, and she doesn’t want to waste this time together with _paperwork_.

Blinking away her lingering thoughts of _guiltshameterror_ , she tunes back properly into whatever Tony’s now saying as his voice pitches even higher.

“-like a goddamn bird, Pep. He was just _perched_ in the rafters of the living room – so, so I’m thinking a loft style bedroom, in shades of truly garish purple, with vent access, and – oh! I could hang like a hawk-feather mobile thing above the bed, just to screw with him really– 

“Hang on, Tony. Are the Avengers moving into the tower?”

Tony blinks. Squints for a long moment. “Um. Yes?” He laughs nervously and rakes a hand through his hair. “That is what I’ve been saying for the past half hour or so. I mean, I know 12% of the tower is still yours– “

She smiles fondly at their little joke. “Top 12%,” she teases. “And no, Tony, it’s fine. They can move in, I haven’t got an issue. It’s not like the tower doesn’t have enough space, and I’m not there half the time anyway. With how often I’m in Malibu, it’ll be nice for you to have the company. Not that I don’t love JARVIS, but it’ll be nice for you to have some regular human company.”

Tony’s mouth twists unhappily, presumably at the prospect of her leaving so often. “Ah– yeah, uh...”

“I’m not going back to Malibu for long, Tony,” she cuts in before he can work himself up. “I just need to get this paperwork back to the board and soothe their ruffled feathers about seeing the Tony Stark of Stark Industries in the thick of it, going up...” she trails off awkwardly, and the silence hangs between them for a moment, heavy and strained. “Anyway!” She pulls up a bright voice that doesn’t fool Tony at all, by the look on his face, but he lets it pass without comment. “I just need to get a handle on the stock drop – it's not even by that much, a few points, nothing we haven’t dealt with before,” she finishes, waving a hand dismissively. “So I’ll be gone four, five days max. But you’ll be busy anyway, cleaning, rebuilding the city – I'm guessing you already have floor plans for each of the Avengers?”

He grins sunnily back at her, and she is relieved to note the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the tension leaving his frame. “Yup! The tower’s already got the giant ‘A’ on the side anyway – I mean, what even are the odds of that one specific letter surviving?”

“4 out of 5. I thought you were a genius with math,” she teases.

“Har, har. Such a joker, Pep. Oh, man, Pep– you gotta see the plans. Cap can have super tensile strength punching bags, and I’m planning to put in a whole high-tech shooting range for the super spies, but Katniss especially should have a special range just for his little medieval bow and arrow trick – it'll be state of the art, I mean where else can you even find a fully customized archery range? Robin Hood of lore will be jealous by the time I’m done.” 

As he continues to ramble on (“It’ll have purple accents, Pep, I’ll burn his eyes out with how goddamn purple it is– “), she realizes that the last time Tony was this excited was when they were building the tower in the first place and powering it with clean energy together, right before Agent Coulson showed up and the world went to hell. She wouldn’t have thought she’d see the enthusiastic gleam back in Tony’s eyes so soon after what happened, but she thinks that if Tony’s so in love with the idea of the Avengers and with the idea of this team, then maybe she can get behind this superhero thing too.

II.  
She could not get behind this superhero thing. She couldn’t even recognize herself as the woman that paced nervously with her hair frizzing out in an unholy mess and her nails bitten to nubs – it was like looking in the mirror and seeing a totally different person staring back. After the world goes to hell yet again (it’s like the Battle of New York had opened the floodgates), after Ultron is defeated, she meets Laura Barton. It’s probably rude, but just a few minutes into meeting the other woman, she can’t help but blurt out her deepest fears, unshed tears burning in her eyes – “How do you do it? While he’s gone – how do you...”

“I don’t sleep,” is Laura’s response. “The kids keep me busy, like I imagine your work keeps you busy at the company. The rest of the time, I don’t sleep.”

When she goes hunting for a clean t-shirt because the baby had spit up on hers while she’d been holding him, Pepper is the first person to discover the divorce papers tucked away in the corner of the dresser drawer. It’s clear the kids don’t know yet, because she can hear them screaming about how cool Iron Man is while carrying Hawkeye as she walks into the living room again.

“I find,” she begins carefully, sitting back down on the couch next to Laura and picking up her wine glass, “that half-empty tampon boxes make good hiding spots.”

Laura just gives her a measured look, to which Pepper nods once in reply.

Pepper had asked her how she did it, being left behind to worry while her husband was being a superhero.

Laura had answered “ _I don’t sleep_.” Pepper thinks that maybe the sentence should have ended at “ _I don’t_.”

III.  
Tony falls every night in his dreams after New York. He falls from wormholes, which quickly morphs into him falling from his penthouse window, which later morphs into watching his Malibu mansion sliding into the ocean. He watches Pepper fall two hundred feet into raging fire, and can feel his heart dropping away with her. He falls and falls, and in his dreams, no one catches him even as he wakes up with a strangled gasp, drenched in cold sweat. Pepper, sweet Pepper tries to soothe his twitching muscles and racing brain, but most nights, he prefers to take his nervous energy down to the workshop. Pepper tries to help him, but she’s the type to want to talk it out, and frowns when he tries to distract and deflect. In the end, her solution usually amounts to “quit being Iron Man” anyway, which brings him no mental peace at all. This is a version of himself that he can’t just walk away from, and while she does understand that, she also doesn’t. It’s like they’re looking across a great chasm, unable to reach each other because their own issues are piled high and blocking the way, and they simply can’t find a way to bridge the divide. So it’s not really a surprise that he finds himself in the workshop most nights, searching for a new Big Project.

He knows Pepper doesn’t sleep easy either, not after Afghanistan, or Stane, or New York, or her own experience with the Mandarin and extremis – but he figures, since he’s the person bringing all her worst fears to life, he’s the last person that should be soothing her through them. He’s tried, but his foot-in-mouth disease usually ends up making thing worse anyway, and talking through her nightmares, like she likes to do, just makes his own worse. At least he’s happy that she’s starting seeing a therapist lately – someone that the not-dead Fury vetted personally. At least Pep’s got a place to talk things through with someone who actually knows how to help her, and is already familiar with SHIELD and the superhero world. It’s a hollow comfort, but it’s all he’s got.

He’d asked Pepper once who they’d have been if she’d stayed down in accounting.

“You would probably be dead, Tony. Afghanistan, or maybe the boozing, the drugs, the parties. It would have been something. You wouldn’t have been Iron Man, and as much as I personally don’t love you jetting around fighting crime, I can’t deny that the world is a better place with Iron Man in it. The world is better off for who you are. I just find it difficult to accept at times. And me... well, I would’ve been... well, not CEO. I’m sure I would’ve done something else great with my life, because I aspire; that’s who I am. But I wouldn’t have been your CEO, and I wouldn’t have gotten to know you. Despite all our problems, I’ve never once regretted getting to know you. Even if it gives me a headache at times.”

“Never regretted knowing me, huh? Not even when you had to kick out my one night stands?”

A grin curls the edges of her lips. “Not even then. My life wouldn’t be half as exciting without you in it. And exciting isn’t always good – but it’s not always a bad thing either.”

 _Huh_. “Never regretted knowing me even with the danger I put you through?” His voice has gone quiet, serious, and she responds in kind.

“No. I chose to stick by you. With Stane, with the company, with Killian – not that Killian left me much choice, but even so. I chose to stay.”

“Why are we so tangled up now, then? If we’ve got no regrets, why are we so– “ he waves a hand frustratedly.

“We have no regrets, but I’m not so sure we fit together perfectly either.”

He’d had no response to that. They hadn’t broken up that night, of course, but it’s a conversation that plays in a loop in his mind every time he’s down in the workshop, hammering out a piece of hot metal instead of lying next to Pep, holding her close as one of them has yet another nightmare.

_Maybe we just don’t fit together._

He clearly heard what she so delicately hadn’t said, with that sentence: _No regrets, but no future either._

One night, when he’s escaped to the workshop after a particularly vicious nightmare, mercifully without waking Pepper up for once, he spots Barton staring at him through the glass doors, JARVIS already granting him entrance to the ‘shop.

“Something I can help you with, Birdbrain?” The inquiry is mild, and he’s still mostly focused on the Iron Man gauntlet he’s currently tinkering with.  
When he gets no verbal response, he looks up, only to see Barton shake his head and slink over to the couch where he perches. He seems content to just occupy a space in the lab and watch him work, so Tony just shrugs and gets on with it. He had clocked the dark circles under Barton’s eyes the moment he’d walked in, and he better than anyone knows the feeling of maybe wanting some company after a night of being haunted by ghosts, but not wanting to talk or engage. He’s mildly curious why Barton didn’t just go find the other half of the spy duo, but decides to just let the other man be. Absently, he notes that he doesn’t mind the silent company himself.

Eventually, the silence makes him twitchy, but instead of putting on music like he would normally do, he begins rambling about all the arrow upgrades he’s currently in the middle of, and pulls up and expands a hologram in the middle of the shop so he can note stuff down as he talks. He’s used to rambling to JARVIS anyway, but he’s aware when Barton slides over to stand beside him, staring at the hologram with a pleased gleam in his eyes. When he notices the soft smile on Clint’s face, Tony can’t help the proud warmth that shoots through his stomach, and he finds himself smiling back.

They stay down in the workshop until an exasperated AI is telling them “ _Sir, the sun has risen, you have not eaten for 72 hours, please go and get some nourishment–_ “ and by then, they have managed to design exactly 28 new trick arrows, and if, during that process, their smiles have become easier and the shadows in their eyes lighter, then no one but themselves and JARVIS has to know.

IV.  
After New York, after Loki, after having his mind pulled out and played with like candy floss, Clint feels like he’s falling without a safety net, falling without ground in sight. This isn’t like when he falls off a multi-story building and can practically parkour his way to safety, landing in a quiet backflip like a cat. This isn’t like the trapeze high-wire of his circus days, where the ringmaster and other trapeze artists would keep an eye out for him, if for no other reason than because injured circus hands couldn’t help rake in money, and before he became Trickshot’s protégé, Clint had been one of the best balancing acts on the high wire. This isn’t like any kind of falling he’s ever experienced before. This is just endless and without purpose.

He goes home, but he cannot connect with Laura or his kids the way he used to. It’s like he’s looking at them from inside a bubble of Loki’s making, and the sounds of his family’s sweet voices are all muffled. It’s like he's separated from them by thick, old-style wavy window glass, and he can’t even see what matters most clearly anymore.

He’s not sure what he’s got left in the wake the destruction Loki had left in his mind and on the streets of the city. He has his family, yet somehow, he feels like they’re just outside of his grasp. It certainly didn’t feel like he possessed the heart that Loki told him he had.

But Clint is nothing if not a great actor, leftover product of his time as a carnie, and he manages to make his SHIELD-issue shrink, not to mention Fury and Hill, believe that he is fine. He is fine, and while Coulson is too dead to contradict him, Nat knows too well what it’s like to be unmade to try and dictate the road for him. She knows he’s anything but fine, but unless he’s actively a danger to himself or anyone around him, she’ll let him come back at his own pace, in his own way. So Clint is fine. He’s fine, he’s an Avenger, he fights the good fight, against aliens and morally bankrupt bad guys and against robots-gone-wrong hellbent on wiping out the entire world. He fights and fights, and falls and falls, off of buildings and wires and inside his own head.

It’s Tony Stark who catches him, both metaphorically and literally – Tony who starts inviting him to late night engineering binges after the first night he’d shown up in the workshop unannounced, because he’d desperately needed company because everything was still too blue, and Natasha had been sleeping. She would have sat up with him, but he’s not sure how much of a comfort she really would have been anyway. Their dynamic had always been more about him bringing Natasha in from the cold, being her rock, comforting her. The kind of stability she offers him isn’t necessarily something he can stomach right then. So when JARVIS had told him that “Sir” was the only other Avenger awake, Clint had decided to take a chance and go find Tony. He was extremely fucking glad he had, because, as it turns out, Tony’s typical drunken-honesty and sarcasm and utter sass works so much better to pull him out his head in a good way than Nat’s subtle manipulations, better than Laura’s sweet comfort, better even than his kids’ guileless faces.

Because Tony _gets it_. Tony gets the horrors that plague him in a way that Laura never will, shadows that even Nat doesn’t understand, because being a spy, an assassin, an agent is the only life Nat has ever known, and she was trained for it practically since the womb. Tony gets it because they are both just men, thrust into difficult circumstances that made them have to step up. Tony understands the pain of a family member betraying you, of having family that hurt you but you couldn’t help but love them so much anyway (sometimes, Clint wonders about Barney, the same brother that abused the hell out of him before finally fucking off for good at seventeen with that pretty blonde chick. Somedays, Clint misses him despite everything). Tony understands waking up one day as an ordinary human living an ordinary life (as ordinary as a genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist's life gets, anyway), and the next day, having to survive a deadly situation and coming out the other side as a superhero. Hawkeye was born in the circus, where Clint Barton, ordinary ten year old boy, was hurt like hell if he couldn’t shoot straight. Hawkeye was just a means of survival, then, under Trickshot’s training. He didn’t own Hawkeye, make the persona his own, until he settled into SHIELD. When he looks at Tony, it’s a little like looking into a mirror.

_(I am Iron Man.)_

He will always love his kids and both his partners (Nat at work and Laura at home), but Tony Stark gets it –gets him– in a way that others just can’t seem to, and Clint can’t even describe how it feels to know that somebody else really, truly understands, because they’ve lived it too. It eases a lonely ache inside of him that he didn’t even know he’d been carrying.

  
V.  
The change is so gradual, Tony barely notices that Natasha goes from ‘backstabbing bitch’ to ‘double agent’ to ‘Agent Romanoff’ to just ‘Romanoff’ and eventually to ‘Natashalie’, when they can actually joke about it. Finally, she becomes ‘Natasha’, and rarely, he even gets to call her ‘Nat’ or ‘Tasha’ when she’s in a softer mood. Somehow, he misses that the amount of time it took Natalie Rushman to become Natasha is directly proportional to the time he’d been spending with Clint (and he was Clint now, most days, except when he was Legolas, Robin Hood, Katniss, Merida, or Hawkass – but not Barton, never Barton anymore). However, whenever, however, his relationships with the spies had changed, Tony found himself feeling more at peace than he had in over a decade. He found himself settled in a way that partying and drinking and sleeping around had never done for him. He found himself feeling like he was at home, in a way he’d always searched for so desperately and never found with Pepper, much to his guilt and shame.

While Tony may have barely noticed the transition in his relationships with the spy-twins, Pepper does not miss the fact that Natasha’s eyes soften when they look at Tony now, as if he is valuable in ways he wasn’t before, because of reasons no one else can see yet. Except she does – Pepper does see that Natasha will always protect Clint first and foremost, and that by being a friend to Clint when he’s most needed it, Tony has unwittingly wormed his way into Natasha’s small circle of protection too. Pepper is glad, really, that Tony has such wonderful people looking out for him, especially in the field. Except– except, she sees the way Tony looks at Clint. It’s more than friendship, more than camaraderie, more than just comfort. It’s the way he used to look at her, before the Mandarin, before New York, before, before, before. She wonders if Tony even realizes that he’s in love with Clint Barton. Probably not. Clint seems oblivious too. But Natasha– Natasha knows, she reflects, as she meets the redheaded assassin’s clever eyes over the back of the couch, the boys not even noticing her presence as they squabble over MarioKart.

Pepper puts the files she’s carrying down on the breakfast bar, and lays a pen on top of them. She tilts her head in Natasha’s direction, who just nods an unspoken promise that Tony will sign those files by tomorrow. Pepper smiles in thanks, silently backing away into the elevator, happy for Tony, but feeling like she is leaving something of herself behind.

  
VI.  
They don’t talk about it. Not really. Tony thinks that they are breaking up for... not entirely incorrect reasons, but Pepper can’t bring herself to tell him the whole truth, all the ugly pieces of it – that in the end, it is both Iron Man and Clint that have caused the distance between them, a gap that they just can’t overcome. It’s not that Pepper blames Clint, of course not – but he has brought into focus all the things that she and Tony had gotten so good at ignoring before. She thinks that if the issue had been just Iron Man, she (they) might have been able to stick to the status quo for a little bit longer.   
But ultimately, their issues don’t boil down to just Iron Man and Clint. Ultimately, it’s about her – she cannot handle the rest of her life staring at her phone so that she never has to feel the sour guilt of a missed call again. She cannot spend her time flipping through news channels covering the Avengers’ latest fight, just hoping and praying for a sign of a red and gold armor still in one piece. She cannot live a whole life of being the wife at home waiting – two and a half years of on-and-off has been hard enough, she cannot imagine doing this every day for the rest of her life, and she just knows, with everything she’s worth, that Tony will never want to spend his whole life doing anything else, or anything less, than exactly what he’s doing right now.

But regardless of her inability to lay the truth completely bare, she knows that Tony still deserves better than a cliché like _it’s not you, it’s me_ , especially when the cliché isn’t even completely true – Tony certainly carries some fault for their problems, and it goes beyond just being Iron Man in the first place. But Pepper can’t - won’t - dive into their tangled knot of issues yet again, because that is a downward spiral without any aim or destination. Besides, Tony knows this is for the best, and that it’s not all on him, or all about Iron Man, she thinks, somewhere deep down. He has to know, even if his ‘genius’ label doesn’t always translate into emotional fortitude, and his guilt complex is a mile wide. If he doesn’t know, she suspects Natasha will beat the truth into him soon enough. So she remains silent, tasting the unspoken words sitting heavily on her tongue, and lets him go with a sad smile, never saying anything beyond “I’m sorry, but Iron Man is something you need, but I can’t come to terms with.”

It feels like a cop-out, but she has nothing else to give. The rest he will have to understand on his own.

They part ways, after that goodbye lunch, amicably agreeing to stay in touch regarding Stark Industries, and more warmly vowing to remain friends.

It’s a bit odd, but nothing changes, really, after that; they still do lunches and dinners where they discuss mostly business, but tactfully try to make sure the other is doing alright too. They take the jet all over the world, attending to meetings and R&D inspections and corporate takeovers, maybe doing a little sightseeing along the way if they happen to have a little extra time. Tony is still sweet and sarcastic and over-the-top, and he tries every day, tries to be punctual and attentive and all the little things Pepper has always half-fondly, half-exasperatedly chastised him for. He doesn’t always succeed, but then he wouldn’t be Tony if he did. And Pepper loves having it easy again, loves spending time with Tony, caring about him as a friend, but without the weight of being his significant other waiting at home for a blow that may or may not come. Pepper loves just being with Tony, without all the expectations that being _with_ him carried. It’s almost ironic that she sees more of him now than she did during their relationship. He’s always making an effort, now, trying to preserve their friendship, she supposes, so he’s always suggesting they spend time together – when he’s not in the armor or debriefing at SHIELD or giving his R&D department hell or off talking arrows and movies with Clint.

Pepper knows that she Tony still love each other as fiercely and strongly as they did before – they just love differently now. Tony prioritizes things differently ever since the creation of Iron Man, and maybe, she thinks, so does she.

  
VII.  
Tony startles badly when Natasha sneaks up behind him and spills a shadow over his workbench where he’s bent over making Clint’s newest arrow. His screwdriver clatters to the table as he whirls around, a patented Stark(TM) glare already gracing his features. “What the hell! Can’t you wear a bell or something?!”

Unfortunately for him, Natasha is immune to his glare, and replies entirely too cheerfully for his liking. “Nope!”

(Honestly, Tony just wants to run as far away from his workshop as his legs will carry him – a cheerful Black Widow never bodes well for anyone.)

“Stark. When are you going to make a move?”

“Hm? What am I making a move on with?” He’s already gone back to being distracted by the arrow, so he’s only half-paying attention to the conversation at best. He glances over his shoulder in time to catch the Black Widow’s glare, which, much to his chagrin, is far more impressive than his own.

“On Barton. When are you going to make a move on Barton?”

That gets his attention. Spluttering, he manages to choke out a weak “Excuse me?”

Natasha’s smirk could make the demented clowns in horror movies cry. “I thought Clint was the deaf one.”

“Why would you even– “

“Maybe because you two have late-night tea parties in here that the rest of us aren’t invited to? Maybe because you two do practically everything together when neither of you is working? Maybe because you keep building him arrows and gear – far more often than you build anything for any of the rest of us? Maybe because he keeps seeking you out after a bad day or bad night – you, not me, who he’s known over a decade now? Would you like me to go on? I can have JARVIS put together an itemized list, if you prefer.” Natasha smiles serenely, absently filing her nails with a scary-pointy knife, as if she hasn’t just blown up Tony’s entire worldview.

After a few long minutes of incredulous staring (eight out of ten nails are meticulously filed down in the meantime), Tony finally finds his voice.

“We’re just– that’s just called being friends! It’s called being a decent person and a decent friend,” he cries.

“Tony. Friends is what you and I are. Friends is what Steve and I are, what you and Banner are. Friends is what I am with Clint. What you are with Clint goes far beyond friendship, and it’s the same for him. You know I’m right,” she says, leveling a mild glare at Tony that’s still icy enough to make most grown men wet their pants.

Stark men are made of iron.

Stark men had balls of steel and didn’t back down from anything. They were, however, smart enough to know when to change tack. “Even if– I’m not saying you’re right– but he just got divorced a few months ago, and Pepper– “

When Natasha speaks next, her voice is somewhat gentler. “Clint and Laura have been divorced for six months, and you and Pepper haven’t been together for nearly nine months. Pepper’s aware of this thing between you and Clint, you know – she's been aware of it all along, since even before the breakup. She saw it coming when you didn’t - she’s always known you better than you know yourself, in some ways. And while Laura doesn’t know about you specifically, she is fine with Clint dating. They’re not in love with each other anymore, not like that. They can’t come together on the things that matter most. Their divorce was sad, and they were both hurt, but it wasn’t bitter or acrimonious, not to mention that Clint still gets to see his kids quite regularly – more often than he did while married and working full-time for SHIELD, actually. And you and Pepper... well, tell me honestly, Tony, are you really not over her?”

Tony sighs. It’s the rare use of his first name that prompts him to answer, really. “I... no, I guess not. I’ll always care for Pep, but... it wasn’t working. It won’t work. We’re just too different, we want different things. The breakup was good. Painful, but... healthy, in the long run, I guess.” He wipes a hand over his face. “Natasha, I– I don’t– “

“Don’t let what happened with Pepper scare you. Give this thing with Clint a shot. A real shot,” Natasha stresses. “No stupid antics. No sabotaging yourself. And if you hurt Clint intentionally –especially in an effort to push him away because of your own insecurities– it won’t matter how well-connected you are. They will never find your body, because if you’ve hurt Clint with intent, I guarantee that Pepper will help me hide the pieces.”

Tony winces. He can totally imagine Pepper aiding Natasha in her mission to dump him somewhere even his bones won’t be found. Hell, most days she threatens to kill him by Louboutin heel because he missed another board meeting.

He sighs. Can he do this? Properly? Maturely? He does have feelings for Clint, he really can’t deny that, and he’s not so oblivious that he hasn’t noticed Clint gravitating towards him too.

“Do you really think Clint‘s ready?” He asks Natasha quietly. He doesn’t bother specifying ready for what – a relationship? A commitment? Or even just a date?

Natasha hums. “Yes. Yes. He might not agree to go out with you the first time you ask,” she warns. “He’s got his own hang-ups. But keep at it. And keep it simple. Clint likes simple.”

“So... no giant stuffed rabbits?”

The corners of Natasha’s mouth just quirk up into a smile before she’s sliding out of his workshop as silently as she’d entered it.

If he strains, he can just barely hear a very faint “Good luck, Stark,” as she passes him by.  
  


VIII.  
Clint is baffled. Just, completely, and utterly balls-up confused.

Tony Stark asked him out. To dinner. That night.

Apparently the genius billionaire had been flirting with him without him ever really realizing it?

Clint had realized he’d been drawn to the other man, but Clint had just figured it was a comfort thing for both of them. Close friends. Family, maybe, as tainted as that word was for most of the tower’s inhabitants. Clearly, he’d been wrong, because this was an unexpected, though not entirely unwelcome, twist.

“ –wear the grey fitted slacks, with the robin’s egg blue dress shirt. It’ll work no matter where he takes you, and that shirt brings out your eyes and your smile,” Natasha’s voice commands brusquely, dragging him over to his shower and practically throwing him in.

...Honestly, it’s not even worth it to resist when she looks like she’s got a plan, and like she’ll murder him with her pinky if he doesn’t follow along, so it’s easier just to take the shower, his anxiety be damned. It’s not even the first time she’s dressed him for a date, anyway–

Laura, Laura in the midnight-blue dress, twirling like a princess...

Shit, he’s got no idea why he said yes to this tonight–

And Natasha thwaps him back to the present, likely knowing very well where his train of thought had gone.

He sighs heavily and scrubs a hand down his face. “Nat, it’s too soon, I can’t– “

Can‘t what? He‘s not even sure what he’d intended to say. All he knows is that half-formed words are stuck in his throat.

“Clint.” When he looks, Natasha’s face is soft and cracked open, so very human. “Clint.” She’s quiet when she speaks, choosing her words with deliberate care. “If you really, honestly cannot do this, I will call it off, and I will go tell Tony personally. If you really are not ready, if you need more time to yourself, say the word, and this ends right now. But if you honestly like him, if you think you would like to get to know him, if you think he is worth it – then don’t close this door because of past experience. Give him a chance; let him surprise you. Let yourself be open to letting life surprise you. You of all people, Clint, have been through so much bad – do not let the bad that has happened stop you from taking advantage of the good that may come. You, more than anyone I know, has earned good. But if you shut yourself to it, good will never come. It cannot. If you are open to opportunity, you might get hurt, yes, but maybe the world might give you some of the good you have earned.”

Natasha takes a deep breath. “You asked me to trust you, once. You said you could show me a way to who I could be. Now, I am asking: will you trust me?”

Clint breathes deep, the smell of winter and the feeling of fresh snow on his skin and the sight of a young girl with flame-red hair and a bone-weary but steely expression swirling around behind his closed eyes.

_“I am the Black Widow.”_

_“You can be more than what they made you, Natalia. You could be anyone.”_

_“I am already anyone I need to be.”_

_“Who do you want to be?”_

_Inhale. “ ...I do not understand.”_

_“Would you like to learn? ...Will you trust me?”_

_“...”_

_“Will you let me show you another way?”_

_Exhale. “ …I will try.”_

He breathes out and opens his eyes, meeting hers squarely. “...I’ll try.”

When she smiles, it is brilliant, and it gives him hope that if she can learn to start over, become someone better, and come home to herself, then maybe he could too.  
  


IX.  
Dinner is good. They end up at a small restaurant that’s just the right mix of upper-class chic environment with a down-to-earth menu, and the wine list is frankly fantastic.

There’s laughter and easy conversation and maybe they were being a little extra tactile, but it felt effortless. It honestly didn’t feel that different from hanging out in Tony’s lab, or in the common room.

There was no awkwardness and the evening just flowed, even when they made the switch to talking about their respective issues. They didn’t talk about things in so many words, exactly, but they were both grown enough to know that if they didn’t address the multiple elephants in the room, the herd would just trample all over them and leave them wrecked all over again. If that happened, this time, they wouldn’t even have each other as life rafts. Leaving things unspoken worked well enough when they were friends, but if they wanted to try their hand at a real relationship, they both knew they would have to talk about everything that still weighed them down, just so that this relationship didn’t go the way of their previous ones.

So they talk, and the next morning Tony has breakfast with Pepper, while Clint meets with Nat at a cafe across town.

”I love him,” Clint tells her.

Pepper watches Tony from across the table. 

“He gets it,” Tony says, refusing to meet her eyes.

”I know. I always knew, Tony.” Pepper smiles more authentically than she’s done for some time.

She’s so thankful when Tony smiles back.  
  


X.  
“I love you. It’s soon to say, but I love you.”

”I don’t remember falling for you,” Clint grins.

”I don’t either,” Tony laughs. “Guess we were just destined to fall.”

————

Natasha looks at Pepper across the formica table of a cafe and smiles.

”Mission accomplished?”

Pepper raises her teacup to her lips. “Mission accomplished.”


End file.
